Ma Bête Noire
by Salmon Queen
Summary: Your 'black beast', your enemy. Or your nemesis. Or your most obvious mistake. Himawari/Sakurako, other pairings to follow.
1. Prologue

**-Prologue-**

Himawari won the vice presidency in a landslide victory, with an overwhelming majority of votes and encouraging pats on the back from her upperclassmen. She felt ecstatic, for good reason, and had no thoughts of malice on her mind.

But, just to be consistent, she rubbed it in Sakurako's face.

"How does it feel, Sakurako, to finally realize your idiotic tactics can get you nowhere? Hm? Prepared to do as I say? Your fall from grace had better be swift, as what will I do without a lackey to wait on me? _Well_?"

Sakurako, apparently, was not at all worried about being consistent, as she opened the door to the student council's club room, her face stoic, and walked out without another word. She left Himawari standing alone, still holding a haughty pose, and perhaps looking more like a fool than she cared to admit.

Two weeks later, Himawari approached the club room to find a note, hastily scrawled on lined paper in ugly handwriting and with a rough ripped edge, taped to the outside door:

'_I quit'_, it said, and although it was not signed, she did not have to ask who it was from.

With her head full of pride and a year of feigned hate and a large stack of papers looming on her desk, Himawari did not bother to chase after her.

* * *

**A/N: Hello!** **This is a story I'll be working on, so follow if you wish! Thank you!**


	2. Chapter 1

**-Chapter 1-**

"Hey, VP! _VP_!"

Himawari stopped walking immediately, turned curtly on her heel, and spun her face around to fix her pursuer with a disapproving look. The short, black-haired girl who'd been following her skidded to a stop and flinched away from her upperclassman as she prepared for the strict, inescapable lecture.

"Haruka," Himawari spoke in a huff, "I've told you, please refer to me as 'Vice President' _exclusively_. My reputation can't risk becoming tarnished merely because you feel the need to refer to me with _nicknames_, which rather imply a lack of respect, don't you think? What's more, you should remember that in a few days, my title will change entirely. Yours, as well. "

Himawari frowned inwardly as she heard herself, sounding more like Ayano by the day. The older girl, who'd just recently started attending high school, had supported Himawari every step of the way, had become an indispensable source of help, and had placed her firmly on the path to presidency. Himawari had won the election—unopposed—at the end of her second year. Now at the fresh start of her third, a few days would pass before she'd officially be rewarded the title she'd sought since she first entered middle school. She supposed, upon further reflection, that she should be grateful she had only become stricter in her manner and more dedicated in her ways, and had not sacrificed her entire personality for the sake of becoming better suited to her hard work. She still enjoyed her silly dramas. Going out with friends on the weekends.

Though invitations to do so these days were admittedly hard to come by.

"Sorry, Prez," Haruka said with a sheepish grin. "Just thought you'd want a peek at these 'future plans' forms, the teachers want us to sort them by mutual interest, so."

The younger girl, who'd apparently tuned out any or all of Himawari's brief speech, thrust her hands out determinedly to offer the papers to her superior. Himawari took them with a sigh, and held them to her chest. Despite the reprehensible behavior her underclassman exhibited, Himawari would be lying if she said she did not have a soft spot for the girl. Small, with black hair coming to rest in a rough fringe beneath her ears, and an inexhaustible source of energy, Haruka optimistically took on any task she was given. Himawari could only honestly complain about Haruka's lack of complaint. Truthfully, Himawari always expected a bit more bite in Haruka's comments, or perhaps for her to put up a fight. _Something_ about Haruka's obedience disconcerted her, although her lively presence was incomprehensibly reassuring.

Still, Haruka's eager-to-please attitude was not what Himawari wanted in the next president, no matter how hard she knew the young girl was working towards the position.

"Yes, well," Himawari brushed a strand of her dark hair from her face, "thank you, Haruka. I believe you've done enough for today."

Haruka's bright eyes widened at the praise, and with a new bounce in her step, she saluted her superior and departed swiftly down the hallway, shouting "see ya, Prez" over her shoulder.

Himawari sighed, and began her walk back to the student council club room. As much as she hoped for a more cultured, and, as bad as it sounded, more _cutthroat_ candidate to give her support to, Kaede was the clear choice for the presidential nomination. Having won the vice presidency last year over a measly pool of under-qualified hopefuls, she was well-liked among her peers. With good reason.

Although Kaede had just surged in rank and gained the second most powerful position in the student council chain of command, she was not eager to rip the title from Himawari's hands and make it her own. Kaede should have been criticizing every student that called Himawari 'Vice President', snarling just enough to let others know that position is _hers_, she had earned it, and Himawari no longer occupied it, thank you. Instead, Kaede stood complacently by and pleased everyone around her with a friendly, disarming smile that she would never use to her advantage. More's the pity.

**"""""""""**

The third time her stomach growled, the noise was loud and long enough that Himawari looked around the student council club room, embarrassed although she knew she was perfectly alone. She placed her pencil on her desk slowly, and, pressing her hand to her stomach, was wondering whether she could will herself to work for a few minutes more when she glanced out the window. Her eyes met with a peach sun, lying low and just above the various trees and houses. A thick film of orange light had settled throughout the town, every object looking dipped in twilight.

Generally, she worked longer than this, and returned home at a darker hour. She liked to avoid getting caught between day and night. But now she stood, and, seeing the long shadow she cast on the floor, was no longer in the mood to stay cooped in a lonely room. She arranged her papers neatly, and picked up the forms Haruka had given her, dropping them into her bag. She would organize them by interest at home, and seek out her own neat print among them, which filled one of the sheets confidently. Any casual reader could see the bright future so clearly in her stars.

A small smile remained on her lips as she closed the student council club room's door and exited the building. Her trip home would be painless, the cool dim light bathing her in relaxation, and unlike the tense darkness she had recently become so accustomed to walking in. The students involved in sports chanted together and sprinted past her, and she breathed in deeply, consuming fresh air and peace of mind. Her eyes did not dwell on the close-knit row of athletes while she walked in her own private way. She understood the need for the solitary elite.

It was ten minutes later, after she'd passed out of campus and into the streets lined with houses on each side, after she'd admired the slight buds on the flower bushes in each yard, that she caught a glimpse of two girls she did not know, and one girl she used to know.

Around a hedge to her left, the three laughed together in what sounded to Himawari like high, strained tones. Her heartbeat was suddenly noticeable.

She could see from her clandestine spot that Sakurako did not have her bag with her, nor was she wearing her uniform. Himawari was suddenly unable to say whether the other girl had attended school that day, or, honestly, any day that week.

They were no longer in the same class.

She also caught a glimpse of hair that, tied back in a ponytail and longer than she remembered, had no familiar clips adorning it. The ponytail swung side to side in a manner that resembled the taunting sway of a sword in front of a captive.

Himawari felt the need to stay behind the clean white fence of the house nearest to her, half-crouching so that her head was out of sight. She bit her lip and berated herself, thinking she was an idiot for hiding, but she did not stand up straight until Sakurako's laughter—a reaction to one of the other girls' mean-spirited jokes—was out of earshot.

She stood up straight then, but did not move. A dog's howl sounded in the distance before a gust of cold wind and the flicker of a streetlight reminded Himawari that the sun was setting and that home was still five minutes away.

**"""""""""**

Himawari ran upstairs in a flurry before her mother could ask her to help with dinner. She threw open her bedroom door, and sat herself on the floor unceremoniously, cross-legged. She began her work by emptying the contents of her bag, dumping everything out with a few flips and shakes. The papers she'd had in a neat pile before were now strewn about in a messy circle around her, with no rhyme or reason. A first for her, in what seemed liked ages.

"Sis?"

Himawari spun her head around, hair slapping her face gracelessly, in time to catch Kaede leaning against the doorframe, with her eyebrows raised. Her sister gestured nervously to the sudden disorder that had apparently attacked Himawari's room.

"What's all this?" Kaede asked, her astute eight-year-old face wearing the guise of a saddened elementary student.

"Ah," Himawari stuttered, feeling her composure slip even farther away, "nothing, really." She took her own look around and saw the blatant disarray cloaking the otherwise spotless floor. "Go, help Mom with dinner."

Kaede was, predictably, not convinced.

"Are you sure—"

"Yes, yes, go help!"

Himawari waved her hands wildly, with a 'shoo-shoo' gesture that had Kaede giving up her investigation, for the time being, while her eyes began to water. She walked downstairs quietly and likely formulating excuses to poke around her sister's room.

Himawari immediately snapped her eyes back to the papers in front of her and sifted through them quickly, rummaging around until she felt a more orderly system was necessary if she was ever going to find what she was looking for. Although it pained her to take her time when the need to find _that form_ was so great, she began to stack those papers she'd already scanned in a pile to her right.

She sat calmly through three paper cuts, as her excitement never waned and her shaky hands were unable to keep all injury at bay. She almost snorted at the idiocy of half the enthusiastic forms. Were some of her underclassmen really still looking forward to becoming astronauts? And yet, as she stacked the last sheet of paper to her side and looked at the clean floor before her, she was not rewarded for her hard work, as she had been in all her duties as vice president for the last year.

She did not find what she was looking for.

For all she knew, Sakurako was not planning on having a future.

Himawari's mother called her downstairs for dinner, and in a flash of anger, the neat stack to her right was transformed into a wild storm of white that decorated her room in preparations she did not care about.

**"""""""""**

Although she was upset, it was not her job to sulk about people who she, really, had no business investigating. After she ate, Himawari had organized her papers the right way, taking care not to look at the names which topped the sheets, lest distraction find its way into her head again. The next morning, she woke without giving a thought to the anonymous slicing ponytail which, encountered in her sleep last night, was a baffling addition to her generally more routine nightmares.

When she arrived at school, she made her way to the teachers' room to hand in the forms, and had planned on doing so wordlessly. But as they passed through her hands and Himawari looked down at the band-aid adorning her pinky, where an irritating cut had been placed during last night's brief frenzy, she stood noncommittally in front of the student council's supervisor's desk.

"Is there anything else you'd like, Himawari?" the teacher asked kindly. Ms. Koriyama, age twenty-seven, had her light hair clasped in a tight bun, with slight wisps of hair escaping to curl around her small ears. To Himawari, she was a positive influence, and a necessary guiding figure. Although not officially the school counselor, Ms. Koriyama's cool charm and tall height had caught the attention of a multitude of girls who brought their woes, whether actual or thinly-veiled excuses for conversation, to her smartly-dressed feet.

"Ah, yes," Himawari struggled, bringing her voice to its usual polite range. "Ms. Koriyama, you—deal with these forms yourself, is that correct? You meet with many of the students, as well?"

Ms. Koriyama smoothed down the front of her shirt and sat up a bit straighter, an air of pride having entered her manner.

"Why, yes. I am one of the principal advisors."

"Then," Himawari cleared her throat, "have you received a form from Ohmuro Sakurako?"

"I suppose I'll have to look through these forms before I can answer you correctly," the teacher said playfully. Himawari, who was supposed to take a strictly business-related interest in the forms, was unable to save herself time and proclaim that she'd already looked, and Sakurako's form was not among them.

"Yes, I—suppose. Ah, Ms. Koriyama?" Himawari held her hands behind her back to hide the fidgeting in her fingers.

"Yes?"

"If you happen to come across her form, I would be happy if you'd request her. Take her under your wing, so to speak?"

Ms. Koriyama's smile widened, eyes communicating more respect than Himawari felt comfortable with. A subtle twist of guilt played with her stomach.

"It's quite nice of you to watch out for your friends, Himawari."

_Friendship does not have much to do with it, anymore,_ Himawari thought. For what she swore was the last time, the carving ponytail waved back and forth at her mockingly from the recesses of her mind.

**"""""""""**

Akari was at her desk, wrestling with the idea of putting her head down and welcoming a few blissful minutes of rest after she'd struggled for hours the night before against an army of math problems. However, as luck would have it, her invisibility was an effect which seemed only to work while she was awake. A split-second nap would result in her body sending out waves of _teacher-please-call-on-me-the-drool-on-my-face-means-I'm-paying-attention _which would put her into an embarrassing situation where the brief rest just wasn't enough of a trade-off.

Luckily for her, a quick tap on the shoulder eradicated all thoughts of sleep from her mind, as it was followed by a neatly folded note on Himawari's signature stationary.

The student council president, passing _notes_? Akari's chest buzzed with excitement as she considered the various possibilities enclosed within, most likely a plea for her help in some insanely difficult task which she'd prove to have an innate talent for. Based on intensely researched laws of the universe, there was precisely a 62% chance Himawari needed her for piloting a mecha, a 20% chance her entire clan had—

A painful jab in the shoulder from a pencil forced a whimper out of her, and another note was slapped onto her desk, this one unfolded:

_JUST GET ON WITH IT._

Akari gulped and opened the first note.

_HAVE YOU TALKED WITH SAKURAKO LATELY?_

Ah. This must be the situation that she'd attributed only a one percent chance to, that Himawari was looking for a trivial bit of information and her special powers would have to go untapped for a bit longer. Akari sighed and scribbled back a response:

_OHMURO AND I HAVEN'T SPOKEN IN AWHILE. SORRY, HIMAWARI! :(_

She passed the note back over her shoulder and sighed again.

"Ms. Akaza, would you care to tell us where the first known written reference to Japan is located?"

Akari jumped in her seat and began sweating bullets while her teacher fixed her with, she thought, an awfully sadistic grin.

**"""""""""**

While her classmate floundered to pull a reasonable response out of thin air, Himawari first scolded herself for her un-president like conduct. She could not risk making a fool out of herself by being caught in one of the most juvenile of all acts, passing notes in class. For shame.

Then, she tugged on a loose strand of her hair and wracked her brain, trying to remember if Akari had always referred to Sakurako by her last name, or whether it was a new, unnerving formality. Absence, perhaps, does not make the heart grow fonder.

Himawari pushed the thought out of her mind and listened to her teacher lecture about a time so long gone by, even her ancestor's dry bones have likely forgotten it.

* * *

**A/N: Hello readers! Wow! I didn't expect such a response! Thanks for reading everyone, and thank you those you story alerted and favorited this work. My special thanks to Nutella, Rinceman, Anonymous, and Ascoeur for reviewing. This is great encouragement!**

**My apologies at the addition of my own characters! Don't worry, they won't disrupt the character dynamics, and at worst, they will serve as plot devices. Apologies as well if there are any grammatical/spelling errors. This is a story I'm very excited to work on, so I'm trying to keep the quality high.  
**

**Look forward to the next chapter!  
**


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